complices, many of whom work in semi- symbiosis. Banksy, for instance, illus- trated the cover for "Think Tank," a 2003 album by the band Blur, of which Damon Albarn is a member. (Banksy later declared that he'd never do com- mercial work again.) Albarn went on to found Gorillaz, a band whose public face is represented by four animated charac- ters. Remi Kabaka, who provides the voice for the band's drummer, works at the gallery as a sort of majordomo. At a recent party at a bar nearby, his name was the password for entry. On a Friday morning, a crowd had gathered on the sidewalk in front of the gallery, an increasingly common prob- lem for Lazarides. "The hookers get re- ally upset if you block their doorway," a neighbor told me, pointing upstairs. The gallerywas supposed to open at noon, but the doors were locked. Peregrine Hill and Dan Mitchell, partners in a London law firm, were among those on the sidewalk. W or- ried that the show would sell out before they got there, they had cut out of work. They were dressed in suits and ties and had come armed with a P.D.A. and a computer printout. The night before, Lazarides had thrown an opening party for Faile, a graffiti collective from Brooklyn. "Theyre probably all hung over," Mitch- ell said of Lazar ides and his crew. 'We need to get ourselves invited to the previews," Hill replied. Eventually, a young man with lime- green high-tops and messy hair came bounding down the street, rolling a cigarette. He was not, it turned out, a Lazarides acolyte but another anxious collector. "Pictures on Walls got sold out of Nick Walker prints," he said, strik- ing up a conversation with the law- yers. (Nick Walker is another graffiti artist from Bristol. Pictures on Walls is the Web site through which Banksy sells, and invariably sells out, his limited-edition prints, which go for under fifteen hundred dollars apiece. 'When we sell prints at below their true market value that is done at the artist's request, not because we're stupid," the Web site reads.) "That was rubbish!" Hill answered. He then asked, in the manner of a Beanie Babies enthusiast, "Did you get one?" "I missed it. Dickhead!" The next to arrive was Caidin Sta- pleton, on spring break from North- eastern University. "Me and my sister are here visiting, and I'm obsessed with Banksy," she said. "I'm like, I'm going to go on an actual trip and find things by him." A woman arrived, unlocked the door to the gallery, and disappeared inside, without acknowledging the crowd. lP "Even if I just found one of his little rats, it'd be awesome," Stapleton said. Eventually, an assistant named Sam materialized and began rehashing the previous night's events. "It was insane," he said. "People were fighting-'I want this, I want that.'" I was supposed to have a meeting with one of Lazarides's deputies. He didn't show. Eventually, Lazarides called in. I'd heard that he kept a secret office nearby. Someone handed me a cordless phone. 'We let the art speak for itself:" Lazarides said, gruffly. "I don't want to be Banksys L " spoKesman. " A ll these little lads look at Banksy the way the youngsters who are into football look at Beckham-he's their hero," Denise James, the director of an or- ganization called Bristol Clean & Green, said recently, sitting in a café on the top floor of a Bristol motorcycle dealership. Clean & Green is charged with clean- ing up graffiti blight, which costs the city more than three hundred thousand dol- lars each year. ''It annoys me, it frustrates me, because it's just so ugly," James said. The graffi tist' s impulse is akin to a blogger's: write some s quickly, which people mayor may not read. Both medi- ums demand wit and nimbleness. They arouse many of the same fears about the lowering of the public discourse and the taking of undeserved liberties. Graffiti aficionados like to say that the form is as ancient as cave drawing, and Banksy takes a similarly romantic view. "Imagine a city where graffiti wasn't illegal, a city where everybody could draw wherever they liked," he once wrote. 'Where the street was awash with a million colors and lime phrases. . . . A city that felt like a party where everyone was invited, not just the estate agents and barons of big business." Detractors of graffiti, however, can trace its spread as assiduously as epi- demiologists mapping an outbreak of diphtheria. Colin Saysell, the anti-graffiti officer, explained that graffiti had first appeared in the U.K. around the same time as the Rock Steady Crew, the Bronx hip- hop group, in 1983. "They went on a European tour and brought with them a number of very famous graf writers from New York as a fringe act," Saysell said. At the end of the eighties, he said, there was a crackdown, which succeeded in squelching local graffiti culture for a